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  • The Judy Blume Book That Scandalized a Nation

    Living with Tom in New Mexico, Judy had not found the freedom, sexual or otherwise, that she had been after when she left John; to the contrary, she had quickly found herself in another bad marriage. Frustrated, she poured her liberatory aspirations into the book; despite her failure of nerve at the end, Sandy Pressman takes herself for a wilder ride than Judy ever had — flying away to a secret assignation with one lover, sleeping with her brother-in-law at a party (a pool party, where the women ended up drunk and topless), dating the husband of a friend in an open marriage.

    “I was wild,” Judy said. “My fantasies were wild.” She remembered having dinner with her agent, Claire Smith, and Smith’s husband in Brooklyn, after both the Smiths had read a draft of Wifey. “Everyone was so scandalized by it. But [Claire] was not so scandalized so that she wouldn’t sell it. A lot of people wanted me to change my name, warning me I would ruin my lovely career if I published this under my own name.” Before publication, she sent a draft to John. “I said, ‘If there is anything in this book that you don’t want, let me know.’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t care … It’s okay with me.’” Judy wasn’t sure that John ever read it — “I don’t think John ever read any of my books” — but at least she had his blessing.

    While she refused to publish under a pseudonym, she did make one concession to the dictates of decency. In an early draft, Judy had written a scene in which Sandy uses her dog to pleasure herself. “The dog did a little licking of Sandy, and that was very satisfying,” she said. “A little oral sex.” The scene was pure fiction — as an adult, Judy never even owned a dog — but it felt true to Sandy’s character. “It seemed like a good thing to do, [for] somebody who was unfulfilled.” Judy couldn’t remember who asked her to remove the scene; it might have been Claire Smith, or her editor, Phyllis Grann, or Helen Honig Meyer, the publisher of Dell, which oversaw Laurel, Judy’s paperback publisher. Judy heard, second- or thirdhand, that when the book went to Meyer, “she was absolutely scandalized — something to do with [how] her granddaughter liked my books.” Whatever the case, the dog had to go.

    When Wifey was published in September 1978, critics mostly agreed that it was not a good book. The Los Angeles Times critic liked Wifey, calling it “a voyage into reality that is somehow funny in spite of its frustrations and disappointments.” But that was a minority point of view. The Minneapolis Tribune critic said she “didn’t feel much of anything except that there was a lot to wade through on the way to the occasionally risqué,” while the Roanoke Times said the book “meets no needs and offers little fun” and “is a collection of stereotypes performing redundant sexual activities amidst much melodrama and shallow perceptions.”

    It’s hard to credit the assertion that the book “offers little fun,” for, if anything, the book offers too much fun, at the expense of characterization. It’s easy to see how Sandy steps out on her marriage but much harder to make sense of her bizarre internal monologue (using a vinegar douche, Sandy imagines that she is concocting “cunt vinaigrette”), or her willingness to go to bed with any man who comes on to her, including her friend’s husband, whose foreplay involves calling her animal names (“my mountain goat, my baby burro”). The problem, for the novel, is not that Sandy is experimental, adventuresome, or even obscene, but rather that she seems to change from page to page. Judy would later stress her own instability during that period (“I was wild”); it’s hardly surprising that the character onto whom she projected her inner life, the character who conceivably would let a dog go down on her, did not entirely cohere on the page.

    Yet the novel has its strengths, ignored by its critics and, presumably, by its millions of readers, who flocked to the sexy stuff, the inferior pastiche of Erica Jong, Jacqueline Susann, or Anne Roiphe. Sneaking around in the bushes, the old Judy Blume is still there. For one thing, she is still a funny writer, unparalleled at depicting a turtle-swallowing toddler or, it turns out, a predictable husband. “Rules and Regulations for a Norman Pressman Fuck,” one section begins. “The room must be dark so they do not have to look at each other. There will be one kiss, with tongue, to get things going. His fingers will pass lightly over her breasts, travel down her belly to her cunt, and stop. He will attempt to find her clitoris.” And so on, unsparingly.
    Wifey also has, nestled in all the moist valleys between breasts and ass cheeks, insightful writing about racial injustice (there is a subplot about whether the Pressmans should sell their house to a Black family), class tensions (between the Pressmans and their friends, between Norman and his employees), and, as ever, the indignities of being young and female. There is a genuine pathos to the story of Sandy’s twin nieces, agreed by all to be unattractive, thanks to their weight and their noses. When it’s time for the twins’ joint nose jobs, long planned by their mother, Sandy drives her mother into New York City to visit the girls in the hospital. The scene offers a pitiless view of the sexism, and materialism, of the culture in which the girls were being raised.

    “It’s a shame they got the Lefferts’ noses instead of ours,” the twins’ grandmother Mona says to Sandy, their aunt. (Sandy feels the same way; earlier in the book, we read of her surprise that her sister “had produced such unattractive children.”) Mona has it on good authority that although a nose job typically costs $1,800, because they are twins and because of professional courtesy (their father, whom Sandy has slept with, is a gynecologist), “they’re getting a break — two thousand dollars for both.”
    Whatever its merits — and it had some — Wifey was treated by readers and critics as less important than its author. Judy Blume had become one of those celebrities — like Barbra Streisand, say, or Elizabeth Taylor — who was bigger than her body of work. A magazine story about Judy, while occasioned by a new book, could ignore the book and focus on the personal life of the woman who had created it, because that was what readers really wanted to know about. Shortly after the publication of Wifey, two of the country’s most widely read magazines ran long stories about Judy. Neither one could have enhanced her reputation as a serious writer.

    In October 1978, People ran a 2,000-word profile by John Neary, which, with its numerous photographs by his wife, Joan Neary, stretched over five pages. The spread opens with a full-page photograph of Judy looking straight at the camera, in a lacy teddy, leaning back against some sort of comforter or pillow. And it’s all downhill from there. The text of the article is a reasonable summation of her career, beginning with the present (Wifey is a smash, in its third printing, paperback rights sold for $350,000) and looking back at her beginnings (the NYU writing class, early rejection letters). But it is, alas, punctuated by the Blume-ian clichés about her weight (100 pounds, “103 on a fat day,” Judy says) and her youthful appearance. “Judy is always mistaken for a daughter when she answers the door of her sprawling, $140,000 adobe home,” the article says, referring to the house in Santa Fe that she had bought after two years in Los Alamos (the article doesn’t say so, but Kitchens did not contribute to the purchase of their houses). Discussing the impact of Margaret on her career, Judy makes herself sound uncharacteristically naïve: “That was the first time I felt, ‘My God, I really can do this! These people are taking me seriously! This is not just pretend, not just something to keep me out of Saks!’” The quotation may have been Judy’s — a mordant allusion to John Blume, who had made the Saks joke about her writing — but the exclamation points, which drive home the false impression that she is a giddy child or a recovering shopaholic, were People’s added touch.

    Photo: © Joan Neary

    Still, Judy colluded with this lightweight approach, this portrait of the artist as a sex kitten. According to Judy, photographer Joan Neary came up with the idea of posing her in a teddy, and Judy just went along with it. But Neary said that wasn’t so. “As a photographer I never posed anyone for a picture — just hung around long enough for people to relax and forget about me,” Neary said. As for the teddy, Neary said it couldn’t have been her idea: “How would I have known she had that garment?” On the second page of the article, Judy is shown fully dressed but with her arms around Tom’s neck and her legs wrapped around his waist; he is holding her in the air, as if he has just spun her around and they have come to a dizzy stop. The caption reads: “In a playful moment, Judy tells husband Tom, ‘I let you live out your fantasies. This is position No. 32.’”

    On the final page of the article, the photograph at the top shows Judy lying barefoot on a bed, on her stomach, her head propped on one hand, while the other hand holds a pen, scribbling something on a pad of paper. Just as the opening photograph of the piece shows her in bed, wearing skimpy nightclothes, the final photograph implies that she scarcely leaves the bed, save for a change of clothes. Sex, writing — it’s all in the bedroom. The caption under the final photograph reads, “‘I do not see myself as a great novelist,’ she says, ‘but it brings people pleasure, and me pleasure. So why not?’”

    Judy always regretted collaborating with the Nearys. “They knew what People wanted, and they delivered.” The article prompted a disappointed letter from novelist Norma Klein, a friend and frequent correspondent. “When I saw that terrible photo of you in People, dressed in the nightgown with that shy, frightened smile on your face, I practically wanted to cry,” Klein wrote. “It was so pathetic and unnecessary. Don’t play into that.” If the People article manages to erase Judy’s career as a pioneering writer for children, painting her instead as a semi-talented dilettante of adult literature, holed up in the bedroom writing about the pleasure principle, with breaks to give Tom “position No. 32,” the New York Times Magazine article that ran two months later does her the disservice — or was it meant to be a favor? — of overlooking the adult novel altogether. The Times Magazine piece, which mentions Wifey only twice, is by Joyce Maynard, who at 25 was already a literary star herself. Maynard had become precociously famous with the 1972 publication, in the Times Magazine, of “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an essay that she expanded the next year into a full-length memoir. By the time she wrote the Blume profile, Maynard had dropped out of Yale, moved in with the writer J.D. Salinger (he had sent her a fan letter after reading her essay in the Times Magazine), left Salinger, gotten married, and had a baby. She brought the baby to her interview with Judy in Manhattan.

    By assigning the profile to a 20-something memoirist celebrated for writing about her own adolescence, the Times Magazine was in effect overdetermining the piece that they would get: an appraisal of Judy the children’s writer. “When Judy Blume visits bookstores to autograph copies of ‘Wifey,’ it is the kids who besiege her,” Maynard wrote. “Every week more than 200 of them write her letters — requesting bust-development exercises and asking for more details on how you get a baby. ‘How can I tell my mother that I know some things about sex?’ Or, simply, ‘I am desperate.’” Maynard effectively sidesteps the occasion for the profile — Judy’s new, bestselling, sexy adult novel — to offer an evaluation of her outsize role in youth culture. Maynard is saying to adults, You may have heard about this sensation called Wifey, but are you aware of what the author means to your daughters?

    “Coming of Age with Judy Blume” is a long piece — it was the longest profile of Judy to date — and, with her ample word limit, Maynard limns the basics of Judy’s life. She inserts in the middle, in the heart of the piece, a trip to Bath, Ohio, where she interviews girls and their mothers about the appeal of Judy’s work and explains the twisty road a Blume hardcover can travel: “Then Beth Rice went on a shopping trip with Christiane Boustani and told Christiane’s mother it was O.K. to buy the book. Christiane got the book from Beth after Beth had read it. Heather Benson, age 13, borrowed Forever on a choir trip. Possibly it was Beth Rice’s copy, now covered in brown paper, since one belonging to another girl was confiscated by a teacher at the Bath Middle School. Heather’s mother, Pat, found the copy Heather had, picked it up and was so shocked she couldn’t put it down.”

    Maynard’s Times profile is the rare piece that quotes actual young people about what Judy means to them, and it’s one of the first to connect her popularity with the rising number of parents challenging her books, asking that the books be removed from schools or libraries — a good sign, it’s implied, since it’s the kind of thing that happens to authors only once they get popular. The accompanying photographs are of Judy talking to teenagers and of daughters and mothers quoted in the piece. In short, Maynard takes Judy — and her readership — seriously.

    Nevertheless, certain clichés follow Judy from article to article. Her youthful mien, for example, remains irresistible to the journalist, even the shrewd Maynard: daughter Randy is “often taken for Judy’s sister”; Judy “still has a girlish voice, and in figure she could be about 12 years old”; she “could fit right in as a guest at a seventh-grade slumber party.” More interesting, Judy herself is far too self-deprecating; she’s unwilling or unable to own her talent. “I can’t entirely explain why they [sell], myself,” Judy tells Maynard about her books’ success. “I know I’m no great literary figure.”

    Mark Oppenheimer

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  • ‘Oh My God, They’re Ruining the Show’

    From the day it premiered, Twin Peaks had a problem. Audiences wanted to know who killed Laura Palmer; David Lynch and Mark Frost weren’t interested in telling them who killed Laura Palmer. When they agreed to reveal the killer, the network was apparently vindicated. Some 17 million viewers tuned in — the highest ratings the show had achieved since the season-two premiere.

    But now that the murder mystery had been resolved, the show had a new, even more vexing problem: If it wasn’t about solving the murder of Laura Palmer, what was Twin Peaks about? Even Bob Iger concedes he may have been too hasty. “Looking back on it now, I’m not convinced I was right,” he said. “Deep down, I felt David was frustrating the audience, but it may well be that my demands for an answer to the question of who killed Laura Palmer threw the show into another kind of narrative disarray.” Mark Frost agrees. “We paid a big price for it. You know, that was something that contributed as much as anything to the momentum falling apart.” David Lynch was even blunter. “That killed Twin Peaks,” he said. “Totally dead. Over. Finished.”

    The problem, of course, was that Twin Peaks wasn’t finished. It was in the middle of its second season, and the story would continue, one way or another, for at least 13 more episodes. “Especially network television— when you’re dealing with 22 episodes, and the production monster’s chasing you, you don’t really have any other choice,” says Mark Frost. “I don’t think it had been fully figured out,” says Scott Frost. “Production is like jumping out of a plane. And you have a parachute, but it’s actually not attached to you yet.”

    The resolution of Laura Palmer’s murder isn’t so much a period at the end of a sentence as it is an ellipsis: Leland may be dead, but BOB is still out there, hunting for another host. Or, to put it another way: With the central mystery resolved, the show’s writers had unprecedented freedom to redefine what Twin Peaks could be. “I don’t know if there was a master plan there at all. We got so good at resolving things we thought up that we were kind of fearless about what we put in,” says writer Robert Engels. “That was one of the things that was fun about the show — that we had the sense that we could pretty much do or try anything,” says writer Harley Peyton. “There were times when that took us down weird avenues, but there were times when it took us in absolutely the right direction. I think we took some wrong turns along the way, but that, to me, is part of the process, and part of making something under sort of insane circumstances.”

    There’s a palpable sense of desperation as Twin Peaks — just one episode removed from Leland’s death — manufactures another, flimsier reason for Cooper to stick around town. Targeted (correctly) by the FBI’s internal affairs division for his extralegal undercover mission at One Eyed Jack’s and (incorrectly) for stealing a large amount of cocaine, Cooper is suspended from the FBI and forced to hand over his badge and gun. Twin Peaks had already flirted with turning Cooper, a consummate outsider, into a Twin Peaks insider. (At the very least, it was hard to imagine him saying good-bye, forever, to the Double R’s coffee and cherry pie.) But Cooper’s dismissal from the FBI, even temporarily, altered the show’s fundamental building blocks in a way that proved challenging to reverse. So much care had been put into crafting the show’s look and feel: What happened when you upended it? “We were doomed the day that Agent Cooper turned in his black suit for lumberjack flannel,” says editor-director Duwayne Dunham.

    Twin Peaks had always managed to juggle its darkest moments with its silliest, but the show’s unique tone was becoming harder and harder to balance. “If we made mistakes along the way, one of them was maybe falling in love with comedy a little too much,” says Peyton. “This is the thing you always have to be careful of as a writer: Are you entertaining yourself, or are you entertaining the audience? We were certainly entertaining ourselves, and the hope was that we would entertain the audience as well.”

    No sustained analysis of season two would be complete without a brief survey of some of the show’s wackier story lines. Nadine Hurley waking from a coma with the strength of a superhero and the mind of a teenager? “I was a big comic book fan, so I brought in Nadine’s superpowers, which I thought was hilarious. That’s on me,” says Peyton. The emergence of Lana Milford (Robyn Lively), a black widow who seduces both of the elderly Milford brothers while turning every other man in Twin Peaks — even, uncharacteristically, Cooper — into a drooling idiot? “That was meant to have a supernatural aspect, but that supernatural aspect never actually comes in, so it’s just unresolved,” says Peyton. Ben Horne, trying to reverse the Civil War while delusionally believing himself to be Robert E. Lee? “That idea came about at the same time Ken Burns’s [The] Civil War miniseries happened. Had that miniseries not come out, I doubt that story ever would have gone into the series,” says writer Scott Frost.

    And then there’s what Peyton acknowledges as “the most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe”: James Hurley’s brief, stand-alone detour into a film noir after he crosses paths with a femme fatale named Evelyn Marsh. “James is just such a wonderful actor, and he had this wonderful vibe that sort of made him a perfect fit for that kind of story, which is why we wanted to do it in the first place,” says Peyton.

    At this point in the story, James’s love life has gone full Peyton Place. “The only thing I really, really wish they would have done is kept James with Donna,” says actor James Marshall. “When Laura died, the reality of their attraction came around. And when they got together, they should’ve stayed together. They could help each other through their grief, and you actually see two people heal while everything else is going crazy. Instead: Evelyn Marsh.”

    “The most grievous thing I ever did in the Twin Peaks universe.”
    Photo: ABC

    In a rare subplot that takes place entirely outside Twin Peaks, James — on a sullen solo motorcycle trip after Maddy is murdered — suddenly wanders into a James M. Cain novel. Twin Peaks had nodded at classic noir tropes before; Neff, the insurance agent who alerted Catherine Martell to a shady policy in the show’s first season, was named in tribute to the protagonist of Cain’s 1943 crime classic Double Indemnity. This particular subplot owes Cain an obvious debt and stretches across five episodes, as the married Marsh picks up James at a bar, hires him as a mechanic, sleeps with him, and frames him for killing her husband before having a change of heart and letting him go.

    It is as paint-by-numbers as a noir story can get, and those responsible for translating it to the small screen were just as dubious of the story line as the audience. “You hadn’t seen a character like Evelyn in Twin Peaks. She felt like she came from, I don’t know, Dynasty or something,” says Dunham, who directed one of the episodes in which the Evelyn Marsh subplot unfolds. “I regret that I didn’t do a better job with it. But it just didn’t fit. It was completely wrong, and it was wrong for James. James — that character — would not be attracted to that. James was one of the Bookhouse Boys.” Marshall agrees. “I think there were a lot of actors on the show who were reputable, seasoned actors — who’ve been around a long time — doing exactly what I was scared to do: going to production and fighting for their parts,” he says.

    “So much happened on the show where I didn’t know if my character was coming or going,” said Lara Flynn Boyle. “I called [David Lynch] every day, like, ‘Oh my God, they’re ruining the show.’ He got sick of hearing from me,” says Sherilyn Fenn. “This costumer, in the second season, said, ‘Oh, I’ve got 20 hula skirts.’ And I was like … ‘Do you think Twin Peaks is just this random, let’s-be-weird-to-be-weird? Because it isn’t. It never was.’”

    “It just was getting weird for weird’s sake,” agrees Dunham. “My thing is: That’s not an accurate understanding of David’s work. It’s not just weird for weird’s sake. There’s a purpose and a reason. That’s why, in David’s hands, he can make that stuff work.”

    The problem reached its nadir in “Episode 21,” the first (and only) episode directed by Uli Edel. As the director of the acclaimed, noirish drama Last Exit to Brooklyn, Edel had earned a reputation as a talent to watch. But his abrasive style clashed with the cast, who were justifiably confident, by then, that they knew what they were doing. During the filming of one scene, “Uli said, ‘You’re just furniture to me, man. Just go where I tell you,’” says Michael Horse. “So I go to the crew and said, ‘This guy, Uli, is he good?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, he’s really good.’ And I went to Uli and said, ‘Hey, man, you can say that to me. But if this isn’t Emmy-quality shit, I’ll come to your house and kick your ass.’”

    Horse’s conflict with Edel was a representative example of the cast’s larger sense that Twin Peaks had been handed to some unfit caretakers while Frost and Lynch were busy elsewhere. “I hope I’m not making anybody mad, but they claimed David and Mark were totally on top of the Twin Peaks stuff — that they were giving yeses and noes and overseeing everything in every detail. But I know that, working with David, it was a way different show. So I just don’t believe that,” says Marshall. “I do think that it had an effect on the show. How could it not? You could be the most talented person on earth. You’re not going to be able to imitate David Lynch.”

    It’s true that the Leland reveal in “Episode 14” was Lynch’s last directing credit until the season-two finale. But while there are Twin Peaks fans who believe season two’s missteps were due to Lynch’s absence, it was Mark Frost who spent some time away from the show during its perceived dip in quality. Just as Lynch spent a chunk of Twin Peaks’s first season directing Wild at Heart, Frost took a leave of absence from season two to direct Storyville, a moody, James Spader–starring political thriller. “His absence made things complicated. Certainly for my relationship with David,” says Peyton.

    By this point, Peyton and Engels — long established as two of Twin Peaks’s most reliable writers — had been given producer credits and taken on some duties that, today, would fall under the umbrella of “showrunning.” When Frost went to New Orleans to shoot Storyville, he left Peyton in charge. “It’s not like I had to somehow convene a writers’ room and figure out what we’re going to do next. We know what every episode is going to be, and Mark was talking to me every day,” says Peyton. “But one night — at, like, almost midnight — my phone rings, and it’s Todd Holland. And Todd is freaking out because he just got off the phone with David Lynch, who gave him a raft of script notes that were going to impact his shooting the following morning. Now, I’m already a little irritated, so I say, ‘Look. Ignore David’s notes. He has no business calling you up at 11 o’clock at night with script notes. Just shoot your day and let it be.’ He’s very thankful, and I feel I’ve done my job.”

    “My phone rings the next day. And David yelled at me for ten minutes. And I’m telling you: Ten minutes is a long time to have someone yell at you. His temper … you didn’t see it very often, but I saw it, and he was fucking furious, yelling at the top of his lungs: How dare I? What the fuck am I doing? Who the fuck do I think I am? The phone call, obviously, did not end well. And my relationship with David — whatever relationship I had — that was the end of our relationship.”

    The disagreements among creatives at the top of the show were further complicated by the actors, who continued to use their own power to try to shape the stories written for their characters. “There were some political things that were starting to happen, and I just got out of the way for the whole thing,” says Marshall. “There were several other actors on the show who were vying for different things, and it was like … I didn’t want to be involved in that.”

    Most significant was the scrapping of a plotline that had been simmering since the beginning of season one: the flirtation between Cooper and Audrey Horne. “As far as I remember, we all believed that they were a couple or going to be a couple,” said Tina Rathborne, who directed one of season one’s many sexually charged scenes between Audrey and Cooper. “Audrey’s seduction of Coop seems part of the dual lesson that Coop is learning. He’s learning about his more innocent side, and he’s learning about his darker side, that he’s willing to be seduced by this young girl. This young, somewhat raunchy girl. But he’s also willing to defend his higher side.”

    In season one, Cooper’s so-called “higher side” seemed to win out. When he found Audrey waiting for him, naked, in his bed at the Great Northern, he let her down by gently explaining that what she really needed was a friend. But owing to Kyle MacLachlan and Fenn’s undeniable onscreen chemistry, the writers kept looping Cooper and Audrey back together. Audrey goes undercover at One Eyed Jack’s to help the man she calls “my special agent”; Cooper risks his career to rescue her. When Audrey meets Denise Bryson and feels threatened by the presence of Cooper’s female FBI peer, she marks her territory by planting a kiss on his lips.

    If the writers didn’t want the audience to be invested in a romance between Cooper and Audrey, they were doing a very, very bad job backing away from the story. That’s because they had every intention of doubling down on what had obviously emerged as the show’s most potent will they/won’t they. “David took me to dinner and basically asked me if I was in love with Kyle,” says Fenn. “And I burst out laughing. Not even slightly! He’s a great guy, he’s a nice person, but that’s it. I didn’t have any feelings that way. At all. The truth is that as human beings, he and I didn’t have that kind of chemistry. But those characters, for some really weird reason, did.” Peyton adds, “We were going to do a — ‘romance’ may be the wrong word, but certainly an exploration of the relationship between Audrey and Cooper. That didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen because Kyle refused.”

    For years, the official story has been that MacLachlan rejected the plotline because he didn’t believe Cooper would get involved with a high-schooler. There’s a solid plot justification for that argument; Cooper did, after all, gently reject Audrey for the same reason back in season one. But whatever the merits of that argument, there’s no question that offscreen dynamics were also in play. At the time, MacLachlan was dating Lara Flynn Boyle, whose push for Donna’s unconvincing bad-girl makeover in season two was judged, by some, to have been a response to Fenn getting more attention for her coquettish performance.

    “I still remember talking with Mark [Frost],” says Peyton. “Mark was saying, ‘No, we’re going to draw a line in the sand. We can’t do this. We planned this pretty carefully, and it’s going to upend our second season.’ Then Kyle went into Mark’s office with David. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting. And then he came out and said, ‘No, we’re not doing it.’ And that was because David was the one who was basically saying, ‘We’re going to go with what the actors prefer.’ The thing about David that I learned over time is that he will sort of do anything for the actors. And because he’ll do anything for them, they will do anything for him.”

    Whatever the underlying reasons for it, even those who were frustrated by MacLachlan’s justification now concede it was better that the Cooper-Audrey plotline didn’t move forward. “It’s hard to say, because nowadays, I would say, ‘No, we can’t do that, because he’s in a position of power and she’s much younger.’ All the things Kyle was saying. It’s easy to say he did it because of Lara Flynn Boyle. But who knows why?” says Peyton. “I mean … he did end up with a love interest who was the same age [as Audrey]. And she was from a convent, for crying out loud.”

    Cooper’s formerly cloistered paramour was Annie Blackburn (Heather Graham), a half-sister of Norma Jennings whose sudden arrival in Twin Peaks was written to fill in the gap where the Cooper-Audrey romance would have been, and actor Heather Graham knew what she was walking into. Prior to being cast, Graham had already made her way into the outskirts of Lynchland by co-starring, opposite Benicio del Toro, in a Calvin Klein commercial Lynch directed. But playing a woman capable of instantly bewitching Dale Cooper would be an entirely different challenge, and Graham met Lynch at his home to discuss the character — after he showed off another ongoing project. “He was doing some kind of experiment where he was putting meat into this kind of art piece and letting ants crawl on it,” says Graham.

    Graham recalls Lynch describing Annie as “a finely tuned machine. Like a Ferrari or a sports car that’s very amazing — but that it can be easily thrown off-balance, if something goes wrong.” Peyton had a blunter appraisal: “Sad to say, Annie was — at least when the character was initially conceived — a damsel in distress. And not a great deal more than that,” he says.

    “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ [Harley Peyton] said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”
    Photo: ABC

    Audrey, for her part, got a new love interest of her own — though not before the show teased a flirtation between Audrey and Bobby, who was briefly positioned as Ben Horne’s new right-hand man. “I don’t know if they were definitely going to go with it. I thought they were definitely going to go with it, and we had those moments,” said Dana Ashbrook. “I think it was either a MacGuffin, or a change of someone’s mind, or I don’t know. It was so on the fly, always, the story.” In the end, Bobby stayed true to Shelly — though not before Gordon Cole planted a kiss on her — and Audrey got her own new love interest in John Justice Wheeler, a dashing young businessman-pilot played by Billy Zane. “It was Harley who came up with [John Justice Wheeler],” says Mark Frost. “When we said, ‘Okay, well, who’s going to sweep Audrey off her feet?’ he said, ‘Well, it should be a singing cowboy.’”

    Wheeler does, in fact, throw on a cowboy hat, take Audrey on a picnic, and serenade her with a rendition of the cowboy folk standard “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” Fenn herself was unconvinced. “He’s a really nice guy. But the first time I met him was at 6 in the morning. And he goes, ‘What would you do if I leaned over the table and kissed you?’ And I go, ‘I’d have a problem with that.’” Still, Wheeler’s routine is enough, apparently, to knock Audrey’s crush on Cooper out of her brain entirely; the episode’s script describes her as “warm and certain” as she reassures Wheeler that she doesn’t have feelings for anyone else.

    With Cooper and Audrey splintering off into their own separate love stories — and much of the other main cast engaged in their own semi-stand-alone arcs — Twin Peaks needed both a villain and an event to justify weaving everything back together. If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, revealed early in season two as having escaped custody hell-bent on revenge. Though it wasn’t clear at the time, Earle’s clash with Cooper would become Twin Peaks’s most significant arc following the resolution of Laura’s murder. “That was supposed to be short-lived,” says Engels. “I talked those guys into hiring [Kenneth Welsh]. He was a friend of mine, and they just loved him, so that character became bigger.”

    After escaping a mental institution and stalking Cooper to Twin Peaks, Earle engages Cooper in a grotesque version of the daily chess game they played when they were partners. Whenever Earle takes a piece, he commits an equivalent murder; the loss of a pawn, for example, leads to the murder of a drifter with no direct connection to the larger narrative.

    Once Cooper realizes the game Earle is playing, he’s savvy enough to build a strategy not aimed at winning the game, but at protecting the pieces remaining on his side of the board. Still: You’d think he’d be smart enough to realize that protecting his queen is paramount — especially since he’s simultaneously falling in love with Annie, whose innocence and lack of worldliness makes her an especially ripe target. And you’d definitely think he’d be smart enough to recognize the danger when the Giant literally appears in front of him, waving his arms and mouthing the word no, after Annie suggests she’ll enter the Miss Twin Peaks pageant. But when Cooper falls in love, it seems, his deductive powers vanish; just a few episodes earlier, he flirts with Annie at the Double R, then walks right by the not-especially-well-disguised Windom Earle.

    If there was anything that bound Twin Peaks’s many threads in the back half of the second season, it was the simmering threat of Cooper’s insane former partner Windom Earle, played by Kenneth Welsh.
    Photo: ABC

    All these plotlines converge in the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks, which also turns out to be the last gasp of the comedy-focused storytelling that had come to the forefront of the first season. The Miss Twin Peaks pageant was designed, among other things, to bring the increasingly scattered group of characters back together: Donna Hayward, Shelly Johnson, Lucy Moran, Nadine Hurley, Lana Milford, and Annie Blackburn all compete, and Norma Jennings, Doc Hayward, Pete Martell, and Dick Tremayne all play a role in judging the pageant. Though she had been targeted by Windom Earle alongside Donna and Shelly just a few episodes earlier, Audrey is noticeably absent for much of the competition. “I called David right away and said, ‘I’m not doing it,’” says Fenn. “No fucking way. Audrey was there, but I didn’t, like, parade up and down a fucking catwalk in a bathing suit.”

    Goofy as it is, the levity feels welcome before Twin Peaks takes its final plunge into the darkness. Lana Milford does something called “contortionistic jazz exotica,” and Lucy Moran does a dance that ends in the splits, which led to actress Kimmy Robertson needing to reassure people that there was no damage to the baby. (Robertson, for the record, was not actually pregnant.) But when Annie Blackburn is crowned Miss Twin Peaks — after a speech that leans heavily on the words of Chief Seattle, a leader of Washington’s Suquamish and Duwamish tribes — Earle, who has infiltrated the Miss Twin Peaks pageant disguised as the Log Lady, makes his move. A queen has been crowned; he’s ready to claim her.

    It’s a strong cliffhanger for the season finale, but that’s not how it originally aired. By this point, ABC’s scheduling of Twin Peaks had become erratic, with lengthy hiatuses in December and January — a problem further exacerbated when the show was preempted by coverage of the Gulf War. After the memorably bizarre cliffhanger of “Episode 23” — which concluded with Josie Packard, revealed as the mysterious shooter who shot Cooper in the season-one finale, somehow trapped in a drawer pull in a Great Northern Hotel room — ABC put the show on hiatus. That troubling sign prompted a fan campaign called COOP, or Citizens Opposed to the Offing of Peaks, to place hundreds of phone calls and send thousands of letters and packages, some containing logs or doughnuts, to ABC. David Lynch goosed the campaign further in a February appearance on Late Night With David Letterman, where the host gamely posted Bob Iger’s mailing address. (“I love annoying these network weasels,” said Letterman.)

    ABC relented, and Twin Peaks returned on Thursday, March 28 — an escape, at last, from the wasteland of Saturday night. But the reprieve was short-lived. Less than a month later, on April 18, 1991, “Episode 27” aired — a return to form that ended, promisingly, with BOB reemerging from the Black Lodge. But anyone intrigued by that cliffhanger was forced to wait nearly two months, to June 10, when the network unceremoniously dumped the final two episodes as a double feature. Though Twin Peaks hadn’t been formally canceled, everyone involved knew the writing was on the wall. “As a phenomenon,” Mark Frost conceded a month before the season-two finale aired, “the show is over.”

    Scott Meslow

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  • ‘MTV Was a Lot Like Kabul’

    Cyndi Lauper leading the crowd at the first MTV New Year’s Eve party at Times Square.
    Photo: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

    The news that MTV is shutting down its music channels does not come as a surprise to me. Starting in 1986, I ran MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and other cable TV networks for 17 years as the CEO of MTV Networks, the sun in Viacom’s solar system. It hasn’t been that for a while. MTV has been losing credibility for years, and it’s devolved into a dumping ground for B-grade reality shows. No new music energy has been pumped into it for ages. 

    Only the U.K. music channels are affected for now, but the United States can’t be far behind. The business case for running music videos on a linear TV cable network in this increasingly digital, on-demand world is terrible and only getting worse. Why sit around and wait for Beyoncé when you can summon her video with a simple click?

    David Ellison, who recently acquired Paramount Global from Viacom, has an opportunity to step back and try to reimagine MTV as a new destination outside the confines of a linear TV network. The music space is now dominated with increasingly predictive and boring algorithms. Maybe there is a way to shake up at least a corner of the huge music market like we did back in 1981, when I was just the marketing guy arriving at the start-up that would become MTV. 

    After we busted through the cable-operator gates with “I Want My MTV,” we became the new gatekeepers. Everyone wanted to be on MTV. Labels and artists lobbied to get their videos in heavy rotation. We could catapult nobodies to stardom in weeks. There was a lot of power to wield, and power doesn’t always bring out the best in people.

    We were in the Zeitgeist business, so we took a lot of chances with new things, not always successfully. If something didn’t work, it died a quick death, and we moved on. We decided we weren’t going to grow old with our audience the way Rolling Stone magazine had — they were still writing about Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. We would refresh and reinvent MTV every four to five years as one group aged out and a new one replaced it.

    Advertisers pay a higher premium to reach young people. The thinking is: Hook them on Crest or Pepsi or Ford early on and you’ve got a customer for life. When MTV said, “We have a direct line to them,” Madison Avenue lined up at our door.

    One by one, record labels agreed to give us clips for free, and they set up whole departments dedicated to servicing MTV. But they never stopped grumbling. They complained about the money they had to spend to increase the quantity and quality of their music videos. So we agreed to pay them millions of dollars through new, multiyear “output deals.” Buried in those deals was a clause granting us exclusivity for six months over any other 24-hour channel on 20 percent of their music videos. The 20 percent of the videos we picked were all the big hits. No potential competitor could take a run at us without access to the hits.

    I was against using hard-nosed tactics with the record companies and artists. Gatekeepers with a heart seemed the best way to prolong our prominence. As “the biggest radio station in the nation,” I argued, we should be fair, humble, and walk softly; the labels were predisposed to resent us. My opinion didn’t always carry the day. I watched some of our talent-relations people blossom into megalomaniacs. I guess it’s human nature that if you are hanging out on boats with Billy Idol and partying with Van Halen and strolling into every dressing room while giving thumbs-up or down to anxious managers, it will eventually turn you into an asshole. I saw it happen again and again.

    A recruit to the Music & Talent department with good ears and a deep knowledge of pop and rock might last three years. To fire them, we might have to find a concierge to kick down a door in an L.A. hotel and revive them after a three-day cocaine binge. We needed a strong human-resources department.

    Tom Freston at a promotional event in 1987.
    Photo: Alan Gilbert/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

    We were witnesses and eager participants in the last display of the legendary excesses of the music business. The party really kicked into gear when Bob Pittman made former radio DJ and label executive Les Garland the head of programming. Les was the one who had gotten Mick Jagger to scream, “I want my MTV.” He referred to himself in the third person as “the Gar Man,” which tells you a lot. Les Garland wasn’t his real name. Like many former radio people on our staff, he created a radio name. “Les Garland” was really Lester Schweikert.

    He looked about my age, but to this day I don’t think his date of birth has ever been revealed. He was an effervescent, good-looking guy with stylish curly brown hair, confident that he was the king of cool. In many ways he was. MTV’s fingers were in every pie of the music-industry machinery and for a while, most things came through or went out from Les. He arrived with deep music-business relationships, full of war stories from the rock-and-roll trenches of the ’70s, which he recounted to entertain his younger minions. It was like David Lee Roth had arrived in an Armani suit and taken over the floor.

    Amid towering speakers, gold records, stacks of videotapes, Sony Trinitrons, overflowing ashtrays, and a bar stocked with tequila and a lineup of squat green Dom Pérignon bottles sent over by the labels, the Les Garland Show streamed. Every time a big ad sale landed, he rang a huge bell. Grizzled label-promotion men in satin jackets and facial hair would slink in and out, usually laughing. Rod Stewart would drop by to play his newest tracks. When female artists came calling, his staff would vacate, and according to office lore, the Gar Man would fornicate with a lucky few. At least, that’s the legend. With Les, it was hard to tell what was true, what was myth, and what was scandal.

    When he wasn’t there, others would sneak in to have sex in his office. At one Christmas party, a staffer full of holiday bravado cozied up to Garland and said, “Les, I just want you to know that I fucked one of your assistants last night on your desk.” Les clinked his glass, said, “Congratulations, Bud,” and walked away.

    Big blowout parties became part of company mythology. “Tequila girls” in short shorts and cowboy hats, decked out in bandolier sashes packed with shot glasses, always circulated. Tequila bottles were nestled in holsters strapped across their hips. Bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds would play. These parties could go on to three or four in the morning, sometimes devolving into after-parties. You could never get away with this kind of office party nowadays. Nonetheless, the next day, a line would form outside the human-resources offices.

    The Gar Man undeniably upped our game, our profile, our whole tempo. I had spent nearly a decade in the 1970s running a clothing export company out of India and Afghanistan and to me, MTV was a lot like Kabul. An exotic new place with a crazy cast of wild characters and few rules.

    A superfan myself, I had the privilege of attending any concert I wanted. Every day we dealt with the biggest stars in the world, along with all the black sheep and characters who handled them. Even though music drove the culture, the business of music was still considered the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder. To people in film and television, it was a lowbrow world of payola, shysters, and semi-gangsters in sharkskin suits. But these were the folks I liked the most. They had hustle, were clever, and loved music. They were also the most fun. Some label heads, like Gil Friesen, who ran A&M, Jeff Ayeroff, who ran Virgin, and Jimmy Iovine, who ran Interscope, became good friends. Many in the MTV crowd had not been to or finished college. I went undercover with my academic credentials. It sounded a lot better to be “the man from Afghanistan” than the M.B.A. from NYU.

    People worked in flip-flops and bathing suits; some slept in their offices. In 1988, at 2 a.m., an overnighter flipped a lit cigarette into his garbage can and burned down a whole floor at 1775 Broadway. Nineteen firefighters were hospitalized. The local radio stations would play Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” and dedicate it to us.

    “Exotic dancers” would be sent over by the music labels. Bands passed through all the time. Lemmy from Motörhead might wander by with a bottle of tequila. We had one receptionist who sold cocaine. Many of the staff found that convenient. Cocaine was rampant in the ’80s, especially in the music industry. Even your dry cleaner was doing it then. People thought coke was the new No-Doz, a harmless pick-me-up powder.

    One of the programming guys, a jovial, former radio hotshot whom Howard Stern had crowned “Pig Virus,” kept his stash in a little plastic receptacle in his desk drawer, the place where you’d put paper clips. In a meeting, he’d nonchalantly open the drawer and take a hit off a collar stay, then politely look around. “Anyone need their beak packed?”

    MTV wasn’t a job; MTV was a life. We were a second family. People would duck out all the time to the bar around the corner. At night, there was always a smorgasbord of things to choose from … concerts, dinners, listening parties, movie screenings. We were in the middle of everything, so we were invited to everything. Not everybody made it out the other side; there were casualties with all the late nights, alcohol, and drugs. No one except me had a family. Margaret and I had a young son, Andrew, at home, which kept me pretty much on the straight and narrow. Once he went to sleep, I could head back out on the town.

    To try to prop up the business side and bring order to the chaos, Pittman installed a series of general managers. They didn’t take. One, David Hilton, undermined his predecessor and then went down in flames. Hilton had zero music chops, which earned him zero respect. I’ve never seen anyone do a worse job at anything. He sent around a note to announce that if anyone was even one minute late to a meeting, they’d be locked out. He locked his door and put a chair under the doorknob. Sometimes we’d all be purposely late so he’d have to have his meeting by himself.

    Robert Downey Jr. and Slash at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards.
    Photo: Barry King/WireImage

    In 1984, MTV held the first Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. We were positioning ourselves as the irreverent alternative to the self-serious Grammy Awards. Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd hosted. The Cars’ “You Might Think” won Best Video, and Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” won pretty much everything else. Madonna rolled around on the stage in a wedding dress while singing “Like a Virgin,” and a star was born.

    When MTV began, we played almost any video we could get our hands on. As we proved our ability to sell records, the bigger stars with bigger budgets pushed aside the punkier stuff. The record companies began to crank up music-video production. Instead of four or five new clips a week, we began to get 50 or 60. Big star holdouts like Bruce Springsteen joined in. Older acts like ZZ Top reengineered their image. Lionel Richie spent $1 million on his “Dancing on the Ceiling” video.

    As MTV became more influential, we also got more scrutiny, and not just from the Christian right. The criticism that stung was that we were not playing Black artists. In a very awkward interview with VJ Mark Goodman, David Bowie challenged him about the channel’s color line. Rick James went on a public crusade about us rejecting his “Super Freak.” He was right.

    Rock radio went backward after the 1960s, when the Beatles and Stones shared airtime and formats with the Supremes and Aretha. The early MTV music programmers came from the world of ’70s FM rock radio, which relied on a format called “album-oriented rock,” or AOR. It was a very researched system but predicated on an underlying racism. “Our audience wants to hear a guitar,” was the refrain from the programming guys. AOR resegregated rock and roll.

    In the 1980s, the record companies all had “Black Music” departments. The trade magazines, Billboard, Cash Box, and Radio & Records, all had separate Black Music charts. It wasn’t just MTV. But we were the only music channel on television. Early MTV did play some Black artists who fit the AOR format — Joan Armatrading, Grace Jones, Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” We gave heavy play to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and “1999.” But that doesn’t excuse the sad fact that the music department would put Hall & Oates doing R&B in heavy rotation, while ignoring Luther Vandross and the Brothers Johnson.

    The wall was finally knocked down by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff always claimed that he forced MTV to play Michael Jackson by saying that if we did not, he would pull all Columbia and Epic videos from the channel. It’s a good story, but I have never found anyone who worked at MTV who had any idea what Walter was talking about. “Billie Jean” was a smash from day one. We wanted that video on our channel. “Beat It” was even better. By the time MJ released the video for “Thriller” toward the end of 1983, he and MTV were in a mutually beneficial relationship. We played his 13-minute mini-movie on the hour, every hour. I ran ads in People magazine with start times. Our ratings went through the roof, and so did Jackson’s album sales.

    In the late ’80s, we opened the aperture further. We were the biggest music outlet in the world; there was no need to follow anyone. MTV would be the first to mainline hip-hop into Middle America’s living rooms with Yo! MTV Raps, hosted by downtown Renaissance man Fab 5 Freddy. Aerosmith and Run-DMC sanctified the rock-rap connection with the clever video “Walk This Way,” and we were off into a whole new world.

    But before that came our next powerhouse: the July 1985 16-hour Live Aid extravaganza held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. At the time, it was the biggest satellite linkup and television broadcast ever. It raised almost $200 million for African famine relief and would set a template for the many all-star fundraising concerts to follow.

    Paul McCartney, Elton John, and David Bowie were on the bill in London. Fans saw a career-making performance by U2 and a showstopper by Queen. Phil Collins performed at Wembley, then jumped on the Concorde to play another set at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, where Mick Jagger tore off Tina Turner’s skirt.

    I rented a car and drove from New York with Bob Friedman, my eager marketing foot soldier, known internally as “the V” for reasons no one remembers. When we got there, we realized our credentials were in the hands of a producer who had disappeared. This was the pre-cell-phone era. There was no one to call. We finally found our way to the artists’ enclosure and jumped the fence. I landed in the dirt right in front of Bob Dylan’s trailer, dusted myself off, and then calmly strolled down lanes of trailers, striking the pose of someone who belonged.

    It was like wandering through the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame trailer park. Signs read: Tom Petty, Santana, Madonna, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, Neil Young. We finally made it to the stage, and I spent the entire show at our news desk, 20 feet from the action. Live Aid was the final step in the legitimization of MTV. We were now like “Kleenex” and “Coke.” That year, we made the covers of Time and Newsweek. As for David Hilton, Pittman finally showed him the door and crowned me general manager. It was my 40th birthday. I had finished my apprenticeship and was ready to run the beast. I got a very warm welcome. Always follow an unpopular person into a job if you can.

    Copyright © 2025 by Tom Freston. From the forthcoming book UNPLUGGED: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu by Tom Freston, to be published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

    ‘Unplugged: Adventures From MTV to Timbuktu’ by Tom Freston









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  • This Is Where Our Game Began

    This Is Where Our Game Began

    Opening day, April 10, 1915, at Washington Park, on Third Avenue between 1st and 3rd Streets in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Tip-Tops (seen in white uniforms) won but finished the season in seventh place out of eight teams.
    Photo: Library of Congress, Bain Collection

    It was always a city game, baseball.

    For all the efforts to slap a pastoral gloss on the sport, for all the attempts to make it about little boys playing in a cow pasture, only someone unfamiliar with the isolation of American farm life could truly believe that baseball came of age in the country.

    What we think of as baseball today is really an urban game.  More precisely, it is “the New York game.”  That’s what modern baseball was first called, and where it was first played.  New York is where its rules were perfected, and where we first kept score.  New York was where the curveball was devised, and the bunt, and the stolen base, and where the home run came into its own.  New York was where admission was first charged to see a game, and where the very first all-star game was played, and the first “world championship.”

    It was in New York, too, where the game’s color line was finally broken, and the reserve clause was made law, and where a players’ league was conceived, and died, and where the first, modern free agent was signed. It was here that the sport’s — or any sport’s — first true superstar emerged, and where the first true baseball stadiums were built. Where sportswriting came into its own, where the first great radio broadcasters plied their trade, and where the first game was televised. It was in New York that the only perfect game in World Series history was pitched, where an expansion team won a World Series for the first time, where 14 World Series were played exclusively within the city limits—and where the World Series was fixed by gamblers.

    Baseball is a game that grew up inextricably linked to the pace, and the customs, and the demands of New York.  It was shaped by the challenges and the possibilities the city had to offer, by its inventiveness and its ambitions, its grandiosity and its corruption.  For the last two centuries, the game’s trajectory has followed the city’s many rises and declines, its booms and its busts, its follies and its tragedies.

    It is not the intention here to enter into the eternal debate over exactly when and where the very first contest involving a bat and a ball took place. Claimants range from Prague to Pittsfield, and just about every burg in between. As David Block notes in Baseball Before We Knew It, ancient hieroglyphics depict Egyptians with bats playing at something called seker-hemat, around 2500 B.C. Berbers in the 1930s were observed playing ta kurt om el mahag, or “the ball of the pilgrim’s mother” — a game one historian theorized was brought to North Africa in the fifth century A.D. by the Vandals, who were credited in turn with inventing the ancient, Northern European game of “longball.” Medieval Normans played grande théque, while their French cousins played la balle empoisonée, the Germans had schlagball, and the Finns played pesapällo.

    Countless other bat-and-ball games evolved under any number of different rules and different names in England. There was hand-in and hand-out, and wicket and cricket, and rounders. There was prisoner’s base, or just “base”; there was tip-cat and one-old-cat; there was feeder, and squares, and northern spell; there was stool-ball, and stobball or stow-ball, and trap ball, and tut-ball; and there was goal ball, barn ball, sting ball, soak ball, stick ball, and burn ball; and round-ball and town ball, and finally — baseball (or base-ball, or base ball).

    The whole welter of English and continental games followed the colonists over to America. On Christmas Day, 1621, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony was enraged to find some of his fellow Pilgrims, “frolicking in ye street, at play openly; some at pitching ye barr, some at stoole ball and shuch-like sport.” At Valley Forge, George Washington was recorded as having taken part in a game of “wicket,” while Lewis and Clark tried to teach a form of “base” to the Nez Perce, and small boys wrote later of watching a grown Abe Lincoln join in their games of town ball: “… how long were his strides, and how his coat-tails stuck out behind, and how we tried to hit him with the ball, as he ran the bases. He entered into the spirit of play as completely as any of us, and we invariably hailed his coming with delight.”

    The first true superstar sports celebrity: Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees.
    Photo: Library of Congress

    The one thing that is clear is that Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with it.  This was widely acknowledged even at the time the myth was first propagated, by a Special Base Ball Commission, handpicked by Albert Spalding in 1905.  Spalding, one of the game’s earliest stars turned team-owner-and-sporting-goods-magnate, was eager to refute the thesis of his friend, Henry Cartwright, that baseball had evolved from the English girls’ game of rounders.  Certain that such antecedents would not serve for the pastime of a young, proud nation just emerging on the world stage, Spalding’s commission seized instead upon the weakest reed imaginable.  This was a letter sent by an aged Western crank named Abner Graves, who would murder his wife in a fit of senile paranoia a few years later.  Graves swore that he had seen Doubleday lay out the whole game one afternoon in 1839 along the banks of the Glimmerglass, in Cooperstown, New York, and that was good enough for the chairman of Spalding’s commission, A.G. Mills.

    Abner Doubleday was the Forrest Gump of the 19th century, a soldier, mystic, and bibliophile with an uncanny ability for being on hand when anything of interest was going on. The first shot of the Civil War, a Confederate cannon blast at Fort Sumter, “penetrated the masonry and burst very near my head,” he later recalled, and in turn he “aimed the first gun on our side in reply to the attack.” He would rise to the rank of major general, sustain two serious wounds, hold the Union line on the first day of Gettysburg, and take the train back to Pennsylvania with President Lincoln, when the president gave his Gettysburg Address. Doubleday read Sanskrit, corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, commanded an all-Black regiment of troops, attended séances at the White House with Mary Todd Lincoln, obtained the first charter for San Francisco’s cable cars, and served as president of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society … but he did not invent baseball.

    Nobody really thought he did, even on Spalding’s commission. A.G. Mills had been friends with Doubleday for 20 years, including a period when Mills was president of the National League. A fellow Civil War officer, Mills had arranged Doubleday’s funeral and his burial at Arlington Cemetery. Yet for as long and as well as he knew him, Mills admitted, he never heard his friend so much as mention baseball. In a brief autobiographical sketch, Doubleday himself wrote that, “In my outdoor sports, I was addicted to” — drumroll, please — “topographical work …”

    Just why anyone took Graves’s claim seriously in the first place is something of a mystery. One of the game’s greatest historians, John Thorn, speculates that this may have come about thanks to feuding factions of Theosophists, who for a time included Spalding. If true, it’s hilarious. Theosophy was an early mix of new age religion, occultism, and spiritualism. It’s as if a group of feuding Scientologists hatched a plot to have L. Ron Hubbard replace Dr. Naismith as the inventor of basketball.

    John Montgomery Ward, who started the Players’ League to compete with the National and American Leagues in 1890. It didn’t last.
    Photo: Library of Congress

    Confronted by reporters years later, Mills fumfahed that his commission had only concluded “that the first baseball diamond was laid out in Cooperstown.”  This was also untrue, but Mills revealed another reason for his commission’s determined gullibility.  That is, the need to move the national game out of the clutches of the dirty, immigrant city:

    “I submit to you gentlemen, that if our search had been for a typical American village, a village that could best stand as a counterpart of all villages where baseball might have been originated and developed — Cooperstown would best fit the bill.”

    And so it would. Though of all the great stars, and the makers of the game that the charming National Baseball Hall of Fame would admit, they would not include … Abner Doubleday.

    By the 1950s, an alternative foundation myth had been set in place, one revolving around how, one fine day in 1846, the New York Knickerbockers Base Ball Club took the steam ferry over to the Elysian Fields, a pleasure park just across the Hudson from Manhattan in Hoboken, to play the mysterious “New York Base Ball Club” in the very first game of “real” baseball — and got plastered, 23-1. I never understood this one even when I first read about it as an 8-year-old boy. If the Knickerbockers invented the damned game, how did they manage to lose the first one so badly?

    The truth, of course, is that they weren’t the first.  The Knickerbockers were just one of at least six early baseball clubs that by 1846 had already existed for years in Manhattan and Brooklyn.  Their chief contribution, as Thorn puts it, was as “consolidators rather than innovators,” combining and formalizing rules that others were already playing by.  “The Knickerbocker Rules” became “the New York Game,” and by the Civil War it had pretty much wiped out every other form of bat-and-ball game in the country.

    Photo: Penguin Random House

    Baseball became “America’s game,” as Walt Whitman called it, with “the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere …” For Mark Twain it was, “The very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging tearing, booming 19th century.”

    But more than America’s game, baseball was New York’s game. It held its own in a town where the other leading spectator sports were rat-baiting, bare-knuckle boxing, and firefighting (The city’s volunteer fire companies used to brawl with each other for the honor of putting out the town’s incessant conflagrations.). The sport came of age in a city that often seemed hell-bent on its own destruction. A city where not just firefighters fought with each other, but rival police departments did, too, and on the steps of City Hall. Where commuter steamboats raced and exploded in the Hudson, and teamsters whipped and cursed each other as they raced their wagons in the streets. A city prone to riot and mayhem at the drop of a rumor, an island ringed by tanneries, slaughterhouses, knacker’s yards and rendering plants, bucket shops and block-and-fall joints.

    Baseball was played anywhere the space could be found, on empty lots and in the streets, on what had just yesterday had been garbage dumps, pig styes, mud flats, and even river bottoms. It was played not just by gentlemen in pleasure gardens, but by men of every background and description. By Black men and white, Hispanic and Irish — of all classes and professions. There were teams composed solely of shipbuilders, firefighters, actors, postal clerks, bank clerks, ferrymen, newspaper reporters and printers’ devils, government bureaucrats, and ministers. There were the Manhattans, a club made up of policemen; and the Phantoms, who were bartenders, and the Pocahontas Club, who were all milkmen. There were the Metropolitans, who were schoolteachers, and the Columbia club of Orange, New Jersey, who were hatters, and the Aesculapeans of Brooklyn, who consisted entirely of eye doctors.

    Almost from the start, too, the game drew gamblers and touts, ward heelers and con artists, adoring groupies, and loutish “bugs” or “kranks,” as the fans were then known. It was a tough game played in a tough town, and right away, many New Yorkers, especially money men and fixers, politicos and promoters, saw the main chance in it just as they did in everything else. They, too, would contribute much to making the game what it became, the first major team sport in the world.

    From The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, by Kevin Baker. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Kevin Baker.

    Kevin Baker

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